Imagine how many people would be biking, riding electric scooters and walking if US cities were actually designed with these modes of transportation in mind.
I ride in LA and if you can get a bike lane at all, it's gonna be a faded strip painted 2 feet from the parked cars/along the sewer grates. There needs to be more separation from the batshit drivers here who wouldn't shrug at a hit and run too. Not very inviting, but I can bike all year at least.
Long ago, when I was working in western Tennessee, I noticed that, in that area, the painted bike lanes were almost always on arterial roads. I even found one that was on a stretch of controlled access highway. Asked a colleague who worked for TDOT about that, and it turns out that you could get extra federal money for roads with bike lanes. So of course, the counties would put the bike lanes on the roads that cost the most to maintain, not the ones that made sense for bicycles.
Outside of a few major cities, I suspect that's invariably how bike lanes are going to end up working in the US.
What you could get people on board behind, though, is traffic calming measures. Bill it as fighting back against the hordes of Waze drivers blasting through your neighborhood as a shortcut, and you might be able to get some political momentum behind it. That would then get you to roads that could support mixed traffic without half-assing it by painting cyclists into a thin ghetto full of potholes and broken glass.
And then pair it with movements to get some questions about how to share the road with bicyclists onto the written driving test, so that drivers at least know how to share the road with cyclists. Right now, nobody's telling them, so they genuinely don't know. Even here in Chicago, I've had surprisingly many water cooler conversations where I had to correct a complaining car commuter who thought that it was illegal for all these bikes to be in the road and that they're supposed to stay on the sidewalk.
That's one of the reasons why the "Share the road" sign is being phased out in favor of the "bikes may use full lane sign".
The proper way to share a lane is in serial fashion, not parallel. This is because lanes are rarely wide enough for a car or truck to pass a cyclist with sufficient distance between the two while both remain within the lane itself.
In fact, many state laws that specify that cyclists must ride as far right as practicable actually have the substandard width lane exception (described above) to that requirement.
One day when I had reduced ride height due to a tire issue, a "traffic calming" device cracked my oil pan. That was just great for the environment. I leaked carcinogenic used oil all along the way, and then had to get the oil pan replaced. The creation of that new oil pan involved industrial activity that surely was not good for the environment.
I don't like to bike because it rains 9+ months out of the year here.
I'm very pro-motorcycle but bicycles have a much lower barrier to entry.
I'll grant you that a car is more convenient for carrying cargo. But with a bike trailer, a bicycle can pretty easily handle most people's cargo requirements—anything from groceries to large appliances like refrigerators. Check out some of these bicycle trailer plans: https://bikecart.pedalpeople.coop
Which may be true, but they encourage cyclists to ride at the edge instead of the middle of the general traffic lane. A motorist not paying attention is going to notice an edge riding cyclist later than they would if they were in the center of the general traffic lane.
> People don't like to bike because it's (rightly) perceived as dangerous.
Not really. Assuming one is riding a bicycle in traffic that's not moving at more than 40 mph, it's not that dangerous at all.
> There needs to be more separation from the batshit drivers here who wouldn't shrug at a hit and run too.
That's a problem with law enforcement, not a problem with the road design. Also, separation doesn't work when there are frequent intersections. It makes more sense to build bike lanes along side arterial roads where traffic is moving in excess of 40 mph and intersections are no more frequent than once every mile or so. On city streets with traffic moving at 0 to 30 mph, it makes far more sense to ride in the center of the general traffic lane while following the rules of the road.
http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/streetcars.html
https://vintageportland.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/trolley-...
From what? Riding horses cross country?
> reconfigured from streetcars and buses and trolleys and trains in cities
That isn't to say you are wrong, just that you are changing the subject.
This is how every city in Europe works. There are only a handful of cities in the US with a well-developed rail network -- and most of those are crumbling due to half a century of under-investment.
This is how I and many other commuters use Amtrak. They even provide "last mile" bus tickets with your fare.
Denmark is a small country and the efforts are huge, yet even there people prefer the car.
The issue is that you can't just build a solid infrastructure for everyone, it's impossibly expensive the further out you get.
If you both have to go to work and pick up your kid at school or in kindergarden and go shopping or take them to practice etc.
That's where the car is convenient. I can't send my kids with public transportation before they are 12 in NY.
So yes it's ver flexible, convenient and practical with a car.
Outside of the Eastern Seaboard, has anyone ever attempted to book a rail trip? It's insane. You have to really work at it and you are losing a ton of time, have overnight "connections" and other odd problems. Furthermore, nearly all the train stations of any size are in the ghetto. The whole system has not kept up with the times. And while there is still some romantic notion of "riding the rails" it quickly gets subsumed by the price, which is also ridiculous.
There's nothing about affluence that requires single family detached homes, that's just a fantasy that's been marketed to us for the past hundred years, and at a huge cost in terms of walkability, time/money/land wasted on traffic and parking, traffic fatalities, etc.
This idea have been marketed and for a good reason, it was good way to save U.S. population from Soviet nuclear threat - in a way Coomies could neither counter, nor replicate on their side - when Commies launch their nukes, it's much better if most people find themselves in separate houses with large tracts of land and little combustible materials, and good basements to protect from fallout, and in a few days, can emerge from there and drive their cars in whichever direction civil defense points as safer.
No public infrastructure will work for that - bus drivers will quickly die of radiation sickness or just refuse to do their work, but for one, one-way trip to save your own ass it's okay.
Essentially, this is why suburbanisation come to being: war planners realized exactly the thing you are pointing out: that evacuating people in a crisis - while the Soviet bombers will be flying (it was before ICBMs) was an impractical idea, it will kill more people than it will save; but what works instead, is to evacuate people in advance: just make them live far from city centers which can be attacked. And redline the city centers: let only people you don't care about surviving, live there.
In 1950s Soviet Union, "workers and peasants" lived in villages and suburbs, these were replaceable anyway and killing them had little benefit. Difficult to replace cadres - engineers, most qualified workers, high ranking military, Party officials and such - lived in posh Stalinist apartments in city centers, and would perish inevitably. In 1950s U.S., it was already other way around. Soviet Union could do nothing about that: they simply couldn't afford an individual house, and thus inevitably, individual car, for everyone - they still can't. It was a clear win and moved a balance in the Cold War a great lot in U.S. favor.
One thing to realize here, it will best of all work if U.S. attacked first - then they choose the timing and attack in late evening in the U.S. when everyone is at home already, are warned, and don't leave their houses in the morning to avoid being caught in road panic, and have some hours to prepare for the Commie attack such as letting go of any combustibles, covering car so it doesn't suck fallout particles in, and stocking water and if possible, food.
Hurricane evacuations even a week in advance are horrible by car. Highway infrastructure simply cannot cope with large movements of people in one direction.
Mass transit is cool, but evacuating an entire modern city on busses isnt viable. (Inter-city rail connections cannot be scaled up in such times.)
In the evacuation model those buses drive out a day full, and then need to drive a day to get back before they can pick up more people. It just doesn't work. No transit system has enough buses.
That is before we point out that if you have anywhere near that many people served you probably have some rail systems that cannot operate outside their lines (third rail power or overhead electric)
Cars have the advantage of there are enough of them. Note that in most evacuation situations the cars are full. (the roads don't have the capacity, but the cars do)
See the recent evac of fort mcmurray canada. That was all cars for hundreds of miles. No hope for busses there.
So the assumption that "90% of people won't need government help" clearly failed to hold true for this relatively small evacuation of 88k people.
The fact remains, most people who are told to evacuate by car will pack their suitcases and enough spending cash so that they can live on their own once they get out. The majority will end up sleeping on the floor of friends/relatives, so once you get them out of danger you don't think about them again. All that is required is enough warning that they can pack (if you don't have this much warning nothing can work anyway), and enough fuel (accounting for gridlock!) along the way.
Government needs to deal with the small number of people who cannot care for themselves, but the vast majority of people can be self sufficient, and having their personal car makes them more self sufficient.
More 25% is not a small number. A car only helps if people can actually get out. A mass evacuation by car of LA, San Francisco, Seattle or NY would fail utterly. Any place that already has significant traffic issues during rush hour (the sorts of places where buses are needed) would face massive drops in the evacuation rate due to gridlock and the areas that they would be evacuating through would rapidly run out of supplies (as happened with Fort McMurray with only 88k people being evacuated).
We shouldn't use bus when they are available for evacuation? Why? If we can get all the bus to be used + add bus from other cities nearby, why should we prevent people from using them? This is scaling much better and people with cars are free to leave with their own cars.
"Cars have the advantage of there are enough of them." --Surely not the case in many urban cities.
New Orleans had huge numbers of school buses. They went unused and were destroyed by flooding.
You might demand that the government not be incompetent, but the reality is that government will screw up badly. Individuals with cars can screw up, but the effects are limited to the people screwing up.
I vastly prefer living in my apartment in Europe than living in a house, especially a US house.
Also, putting every family in a separate free-standing house is ridiculous: there is physically no way to achieve that.
Just the economic and yeah, transportation infrastructure we have in Europe won't support that. It's not even the population density really.
Until we invent teleportation, putting everyone in their own separate house is unsustainable.
For most people, the ideal life is having your yard and be able to drive everywhere with enough lanes on the street to be sure you never hit traffic. Except that ideal situation rarely exists, all the roads are clogged (induced demand!) and having a large house for every person means a big desirable city to work can't scale. Even LA has understood they couldn't keep building highways and needed to densify, it just doesn't scale.
Having lived in a European city I was appalled of how bad the air quality was, how noisy the streets were, how annoying trash collection at 5am was, I had to use a wet mop on the hardwood floor almost on a daily basis to and it was black every day. I had to walk a half a mile to a tiny parklet, always packed with kids as it was the only location in the play. Every morning on the packed subway and street buses. It was awful, I couldn't wait to get back home.
Back home I live in a green environment, trees everywhere, I got my lawn, there are no fences, I forget to close my garage door at night no problem, nothing is ever missing ... I use a wet mop every other week and it is never dirty.
Do you know what generates the CO2 emissions? All that useless junk we buy shipped from all corners of the world. The fix is buying less junk not blaming on someone that happens to want to live in a green environment.
I know it's hard to be criticized for your lifestyle, but please do your research, suburbans lifestyle is nowhere near sustainable. That's not anecdata, that's data.
I don't actually live in the suburbs, just a small town that looks like a suburb, and I also lived in European style cities hence I understand the attractiveness of a suburb. It is a different lifestyle and you can't "fix" the suburbs with the wrong kind of arguments - "you my friend suck for wanting to live there" Find a suburb looking place in Europe and check the prices ... now think about it, do Europeans assign value to that?
The vast majority of cities do not even remotely look like some of the elite and lucky European cities that are built on the many advantages they got from (not looking for a flamewar here) but exploiting other nations (the behavior is in the past, but the advantages remain and accumulate), all I am saying is that it cannot be a model for <insert eastern european city here>.
If anything the clean, quiet, well kept European city is non-sustainable and non-replicate-able as a global model. We need to fix the problems of the suburbs but not by imposing a model that cannot work.
The global city model is a far less livable.